Applied Futurology

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Applied Futurology E050 2024 12 27
A Bit of Security for December 27, 2024
I recently read an article on Futures Thinking, an update on Design Thinking. It raises an interesting and useful question. How can you predict the future? Can you get good at it? I would suggest yes, you can, and here’s how.
A useful prediction can help guide strategic planning. Good planning optimizes scarce resources. If you plan well, you will overcome your competitors – you will make better resource allocation decisions and over the long run you have a greater likelihood of achieving your goals. For this to work, your predictions need certain specific qualities.
1. They must be specific. You have to state an outcome, a likelihood, and key indicators that things are rolling that way – or that they aren’t.
2. They cannot be trivial. They must be consequential.
3. They must be revisable. A prediction that cannot be altered in light of new information is inflexible. That brittleness means you cannot incorporate learning, lessons learned, and you cannot get better at making predictions.
Make a prediction that can be measured:
“By December 2026, general artificial intelligence will guide product marketing at five of the Fortune 50 organizations as seen in their annual reports. This will improve time to market by 20 percent and reduce new product launch costs by 5 to 8 percent.”
Such a prediction should also have some evidence.
“Currently 10 of the F50 are each investing millions of dollars on developing and deploying AGI, with product marketing a key focus area in at least half of these.”
And the prediction should have some key indicators, such as press releases from these organizations stating milestones achieved or missed during the development and deployment process.
It's cool to make stunning predictions, but essentially useless other than for entertainment value. A useful prediction gives you more than an endorphin rush.
By laying out the evidence and explaining the chain of reasoning, you can look back and tune your predictive analysis. If the prediction comes true, you can celebrate. If it does not, you must look at the evidence – what did you miss? What happened that unexpectedly changed the landscape on the way to the future? Or, you should examine the chain of reasoning to find what the logical flaw was that kept you from being more accurate? What fallacy of thinking impeded a better assessment? That’s how you get better at doing applied futurology.
I’ve led numerous strategic planning workshops with clients over the past few decades. When at Gartner, we did an audit of our forecasts for the Information Security Strategies service and the Application Integration and Middleware service. We were batting about .820 – the predictions were over 80 percent correct.
That’s not luck, it’s the result of a well-tuned methodology.
References:
The Art of the Long View, Peter Schwartz – describes the scenaric methodology
Jerome Glenn, Futurologist – discusses the method for applied futurology
Applied Futurology
A Bit of Security for December 27, 2024
Here’s how to predict the future, and how to get better at it. Listen to this -
Let me know what you think in the comments below or at wjmalik@noc.social
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